Category: Knowledge

This is how I feel… I was born to do more. Yet I don’t have all the right tools to achieve it. So I must persevere. So how am I going to persevere? Life’s passion – building technology companies. Helping others – helping other tech entrepreneurs grow their tech businesses through strategy, partnerships, integrations and more (do read on). Get a job – permanent, contract or interim. I have accumulated 15,000 contacts since 2004 (the year I started my tech entrepreneur journey). 5,000 of those are on Linkedin. Business friends see my networking abilities as my greatest USP. “To say we go back long…

Thanks to Mark Deakin, we made a decision to start supporting Microsoft (credit also goes to James Akrigg who spent few hours with me early this year. Then the timing wasn’t right for us to act). But returning to Microsoft has not been plain sailing. This post is very much a place to capture how I am navigating through the various hurdles thrown at me. To start with, I seem to have multiple accounts using the same email address. One seem to be called personal, another work and who knows, there could be more. Secondly, there is no real single sign…

I’m no SEO expert. I ended up on SEO Profiler by accident. Not quite true though. I check edocr.com and UnifiedVU standing on Alexa quite often. Once edocr.com reached 14,000th largest website in the world (according to Alexa), and those days, I was quite obsessed in trying to get to 10,000th and beyond. A quick review of UnifiedVU on SEO Profiler revealed the followings: Active backlinks: 553 Unique active backlinks: 22 Links to home page: 540 Link Influence Score (LIS): 4% When I started analysing the 22 unique backlinks, I found out: Creately.com – LIS 97% GrowthHackers.com – LIS 93% Pipedrive…

The Launch Until 8:00 am this morning, I couldn’t justify a reason to attend the launch of much hyped TechNorth in Leeds. By 8:15 am, I regretted my decision, and by 10:15 I was listening to TechCity CEO launching the event. Yes in Leeds! In 2006, except for few of us, tech entrepreneurship was not fashionable like today. Those naysayers then have become champions of the sector today. And it has been a pleasure for me to watch the transition. In early days, the effort of building the tech ecosystem rested with number of passionate individuals. In Sheffield you had Lee…

I had the pleasure to listen to Ajaz Ahmed, the founder of £1.6 billion Freeserve today at the TiENorth event at HSBC, Spinningfield, Manchester. I’ve hosted Ajaz before, in fact twice and he was the keynote speaker at our first Northern Tech Awards in 2011. Today’s session was title #CutTheCrap and was full of great case studies and advice for the budding entrepreneur. What was remarkable about his speech was that every slide simply had a unique hashtag. It was optimised for tweeps. manojranaweera Say everyday #ineedmycustomers more than they need me #CutTheCrap @Ajaz_Ahmed 10/11/2014 19:20 manojranaweera Love the #uglybabysyndrome…

If you ever had the fortune (or misfortune, depending on your circumstances) to get involved with an early stage technology company, you would have heard no ending of the abbreviation MVP. For the unfamiliar, MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product. While we use the term liberally, do we really understand what it means? More importantly, has your early stage product reached the status of MVP? I would like to argue that MVP is not a single state of a product. In fact, it revolves around three stages, depending on your vision and strategy. The Minimum Usable Product Many startups…

We saw over the last few years how Mark Suster and Fred Wilson became investor celebrities by blogging consistently on startup topics. They have both build a large follower base, and industry wide respect due to openly sharing the knowledge they have. There is nothing more important than consistency of sticking to one core subject and blogging at regular intervals (one or few times a week) more important than anything else. Of course, it goes without saying that you need to know something about the subject matter. However, you do not need to be an authority when you start, but you will surely…